My new hobby

It's been pretty quiet around here lately, the holidays combined with laziness has been part of that, but most of it has been because I picked up a new hobby. I mentioned this possibility a few weeks ago and decided to make the leap a couple weeks ago. The hobby is of course photography and it's something that once I started doing it completely captured my imagination. I started out by borrowing the very basic Kodak digital camera I bought for my father last christmas. I wanted to get a feel for things to see if I really liked it and to see what I'd want in a camera that I purchased. I went out a couple days with the express intention of taking pictures and had an absolute blast doing it. Didn't get a lot of great pictures out of it, but it certainly cemented my interest in buying a camera for myself.

It also taught me a lot about what I wanted out of a camera. My original plan was to buy a Canon A70 as they're quite inexpensive and I know it's perfectly possible to get great pictures with it. However shooting with the Kodak made it clear that I really wanted more then a 3x optical zoom. The Kodak has 3x, as does the Canon A70. This lead me to a choice between the Fuji FinePix S5000 or the Olympus C740. Both are 3 megapixels, have 10x optical zooms and plenty of manual control over the functions of the camera(something the Kodak completely lacked). I really liked the feel of the Fuji, but it seemed the Olympus reviewed better and had the added bonus that I could buy it from Costco (no hassle returns for six months).

The Olympus is a nice little camera, the zoom is great and it does have most of the manual controls that you would want. Unfortunately, I also found it had several things that I didn't like. For one thing the camera was very small, but not small enough to actually fit in your pocket. Not even in the pocket of the cargo shorts that I usually wear. This is a result of the 10x zoom lens. I believe the Olympus is the smallest camera with a 10x zoom, but they need to shave it down even more to make it's size an asset. If you can't fit it in your pocket, being small isn't that much benefit. The size was kind of an annoyance, but what really did the camera in for me was a combination of shutter lag and cumbersome manual controls. My interest is in photography as a hobby so I want to learn all about apertures, shutter speeds and all the other goodies you can play with to get the pictures you want. The Olympus made all of this possible, all the controls were there, they just weren't natural to work with. And then there's that shutter lag thing, hit shutter button, wait, camera finally takes picture after the moment has passed. As far as I know this is a problem for all compact digital cameras and compared to most, the Olympus is actually pretty good in that regard (the Kodak I bought for my father really lags). Regardless, it was something, even in my limited experience, that drove me nuts.

So, the Olympus went back to Costco and I completely blew my miniscule budget and bought a Canon digital Rebel instead. There's absolutely no way I can afford the Rebel right now, but I also knew that I wouldn't be happy with anything else. So the time I usually spend posting here has been spent immersed in learning the basics of photography and taking lots and lots of pictures. The Rebel is a great camera and I'm a really bad photographer, but I'm happy that I have a camera that I can take to just about any level as I learn.

The Rebel is a 6 mega-pixel digital SLR that can take any of the lenses and accessories in the Canon EOS line. It comes with a 18-55mm zoom lens and yesterday I added a 28-135 USM image stabilizing (IS) zoom. Right now I'm a little unsure about the 28-135 USM IS. I read a lot of reviews and people generally considered it a pretty good walking around lens. However, for me I've been getting a lot of blurry shots that I don't think should be blurry. That's exactly what the IS is supposed to prevent, or that's what I expected it to do anyway. I went out today under cloudy conditions where the IS should have been a big aid, but even when I think I'm holding it pretty steady, have a fast enough shutter speed and focus lock on the subject I'm not getting too great of results. I definitely need to work with it more to find out if it's the lens, or just a problem with what I'm doing(almost certainly the latter). I have had pretty good results with the 18-55mm lens that came with the camera, it's just too short for me when out walking around. The Rebel itself is great. I love the through the lens view that comes from it being an SLR and I also love the lack of shutter lag. The Rebel has all of the automatic modes that point and shoot digitals have, but I haven't really used them much. I've been using the camera almost exclusively in what Canon calls creative modes, the modes where you manually set some or all of the settings. On the Rebel this is much more natural then it was on the Olympus and you can tell that the camera was designed to be operated this way.

So, that's my new hobby. I'll be posting a few pics from time to time if I get something that I like. I definitely have a lot to learn. At this point I think I have the very basics of the camera operation down and I've learned a ton about the relationships between aperature, shutter speed and ISO settings. Now I just have the whole world to learn about how to make use of them to actually get something worth looking at.

Posted by Kimbro Staken